The Guardian May 17, 2025

In Saudi Arabia, he did not merely greet Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman warmly, he gushed with adoration. “I like you too much,” he said to Prince Mohammed, asking the de-facto ruler once snubbed by Washington for his reliance on the bone saw if he ever found time to sleep, given how energetically he had transformed his kingdom.

The two men agreed a deal that will see Saudi Arabia acquire $142billion of US arms.
“My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” Yet arms sale

Until this week, a cornerstone of the U.S.-Israel relationship was a U.S. guarantee that Israel would always enjoy military superiority over its neighbours.
That looks much less certain now.

Indeed, Trump declared that the U.S. has “no stronger partner” than Saudi Arabia, a status that used to belong to Israel alone.
He is not going to declare U.S. has “no stronger partner” than Israel in Saudi Arabia

What’s more, Trump showed Riyadh all this love with none of the previous strings attached. None of it was conditional on Saudi “normalisation” of relations with Israel. Trump said Prince Mohammed could do that when he was good and ready, free of U.S. pressure.

And this was the pattern throughout. Strikingly, in a shift that would have garnered huge attention had it been any other president but which, because it was Trump, was just one more turn of the news cycle, Trump welcomed Syria in from the cold.

He lifted U.S. sanctions and praised the country’s new leader as “attractive” and a “fighter”. Given that until December Ahmed al-Sharaa was on a U.S. list of wanted terrorists over his links to al-Qaida, and had a $10million bounty on his head, this is quite the turnaround.

Confirming that one of Trump’s great weaknesses as a negotiator is his tendency to give something for nothing, Trump handed all this to Sharaa without even raising the security assurances sought by Israel.